Current Release: September 11th, 2007 | Vol. XXIV Iss. 10

Photo By Alexandra drogus

Two VWC biology professors receive grants

By America ballerini

aballerini@vwc.edu

Dr. Deidre Gonsalves-Jackson and Dr. Soraya Moein Bartol, both professors at Virginia Wesleyan College, were awarded grants for different biology projects.

Dr. Deidre Gonsalves-Jackson and her partners received the Assembling the Tree of Life grant entitled “Phylogeny on the Half-Shell-Assembling the Bivalve Tree of Life” for $2,998,310 from the National Science Foundation. “I believe fifteen of us applied for the grant together,” Gonsalves-Jackson said. “It’s a huge collaborative effort.” Her partners for the grant are located all over the world including Spain, New York, and Europe.

The project started in September 2007 and will last for the next five years. The research and information collected will help create basically a family tree on half-shells such as clams. “What we’re going to do is sort out how they’re related,” Gonsalves-Jackson said. “It’s like if someone hands you three thousand clams and tells you to order them from the oldest to the newest, that’s what we’re doing,” she said.

Everyone in the group was assigned a different area to study. “My area of the research will be to collect specimens and dissect their reproductive anatomy,” Gonsalves-Jackson said. She personally received $17,722 of the grant money. That share of the money is to be spent on the research as well as paying one or two Virginia Wesleyan undergraduates who help in the summers. An announcement about the chance to help will be posted later in the semester for any students interested in the research.

The student will be able to help research, travel to places such as Thailand and Australia, and assist in creating a curriculum for a bivalve evolution course that Gonsalves-Jackson will teach. “I’ll probably start teaching the class during the fourth and fifth years of the research,” she said.

Along with Gonsalves-Jackson receiving a grant, Dr. Soraya Moein Bartol will be part of a $386,653 contract with the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP) Joint Industry Programme (JIP). She is now the lead researcher, along with her husband Ian Bartol, on the hearing capabilities of Loggerhead Sea Turtles for the next three years, which began in January 2008. “It took about two weeks to write a proposal,” Bartol said. “It requires a lot of work and time.”

The research will require auditory brainstem responses and behavioral audiograms to be collected from various size classes and species. “We’re trying to figure out what frequencies sea turtles hear,” Bartol said. The information will help understand the hearing capabilities of sea turtles and determine how sea turtles respond to different human-made noise sources.

All of the research will be done in Galveston, Texas at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Galveston Laboratory. The facility keeps hatchling sea turtles until a certain age which will allow Bartol to be able to study hundreds of sea turtles.

Bartol has 15 years experience working with sea turtles. She has experience collecting electrophysiological data from multiple species of sea turtles and has performed many research studies on the sensory physiology of sea turtles. Also, for the past seven years, Bartol has been collecting

ABRs of sea turtles.

This grant also includes funding for a student to work as an undergraduate research assistant. Bartol will make an announcement and accept applications later in the semester for an undergraduate to help with the research each summer and be compensated. Also, an Old Dominion University graduate is helping with the research for six months.